


A Million Billion Trillion Stars

by waketosleep



Series: The Casey Kirk Chronicles [2]
Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: Gen, Kidfic, cliche bingo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-15
Updated: 2009-11-15
Packaged: 2017-10-02 23:43:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waketosleep/pseuds/waketosleep
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Joanna McCoy's life becomes forever plagued by Casey Kirk, but maybe she doesn't really mind all that much.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Million Billion Trillion Stars

Bones was already yelling before the door to Jim's cabin even opened.

"--Heart-devouring bitch is still _warm_ in her _grave_ and he's already kicking my little girl out in the street!"

If pressed to think about it, Jim probably would have been able to say that yes, when Bones' ex-wife died, it was probably going to be hard on him, because he was Bones. He wouldn't have foreseen this much rage, though. Jim set down his datapad and opened the desk drawer where he kept the scotch he'd won off Scotty in a poker game.

"Sit down, Bones, and you'd better start over, because my walls are soundproof."

Bones chose to pace wildly instead, and Jim decided it was best to let him burn off some energy. He poured a drink in anticipation of his friend's collapse and sat back to wait for it all to unravel. The man had been on the comm all week since he'd found out about the car accident, talking back and forth with lawyers on Earth.

"That dickless piece of trash Jocelyn married is telling me to come pick up Joanna before he sends her to _foster care_! He gave me _two weeks_!"

Jim winced. They were twelve parsecs away from Earth and wouldn't be home in less than a month, even at maximum warp (which he would do, for Bones, if it would help).

"What a cock," he said in support.

Bones finally stopped wearing a trench in the floor and threw himself into the other chair, seizing his scotch. "Jocelyn had no family and I sure as hell wouldn't give Jo to any of mine. What do I do, Jim?" he said plaintively.

If there was anything in the universe that should never be allowed to happen, ever, it was Leonard McCoy looking brokenhearted. Jim was powerless against that face and he took a sip of his drink, staring fiercely at nothing as his brain kicked into planning mode.

"Alright," he said after several moments, putting down his glass with a clunk. Bones, who had started morosely swigging his own drink and rubbing at his temples, looked up forlornly. Jim made authoritative eye contact.

"I'll call my mom."

Bones blinked. "Oh no. I don't wanna--" He was cut off by Jim raising his hand.

"No, shut up and stop being Southern. She loves Joanna, I think she'll do it. A shuttle from Atlanta to Cedar Rapids takes like an hour, and Jo can stay at the farm until you can get back to Earth or make other arrangements." He grinned. "Casey'll like the company, although she may not admit it."

Gratifyingly, Bones sagged in his chair. "Jim, you have no idea how--"

"Yes, I do, and it's okay," Jim said, getting up and clapping him on the shoulder on the way past. "You sit here and drink while I go call her. Try to breathe."

A grin twitched onto his face as he left his quarters for the bridge. He knew exactly how hard it was to be a dad from twelve parsecs away and Bones deserved any kind of help he could get. As Jim stepped into the turbolift, he wondered how much scotch would be left by the time he got back.

***

Iowa was flat and greenish-brown through the taxi windows, and a patch of July sunlight heated Joanna's arm while the air conditioning chilled the rest of her. She rolled her head against the headrest as the miles crawled by, and the robotic driver said they were only ten minutes away. She sighed and half-closed her eyes against the blur of fields.

Winona Kirk was leaning on a faded fence when they pulled up in front of the farm gate, shading her eyes against the sunshine. She jogged up with a credit chip to pay the fare before helping Joanna with her bags.

"I've got the quad," she said, "just throw it all on the back. Sorry I wasn't able to pick you up at the shuttle station."

Joanna shrugged. Not having to talk to anyone on the long drive to Riverside had suited her just fine. She obediently hauled her luggage up onto the plywood shelf on the back of the quad and got on while Winona shut the gate behind them.

"Hang on," Winona said, revving the engine, and Joanna's hair blew back from her face and she squinted away dust all the way up to the house.

Her dad had said over the comm that she'd been here once, a long time ago, but she didn't remember. The house was two stories of weathered, grey wood, with a long front porch and smudged windows that caught the sun. Winona handed her a duffel bag as she stood in the yard, staring up at it, and walked by her up the porch steps.

"We'll get this stuff in your room--you'll be in Sam's old room--and then you can go find Casey. She should be out in the barn." They marched up the narrow stairs, dragging the bags, and dumped them in a pile in a bedroom on the left, which was smallish and square and full of light. It was hot, and Joanna realized suddenly that farmhouses didn't tend to have central air. She sighed under her breath, and Winona laid a hand on her shoulder.

"Tell Casey supper's gonna be in an hour, and make sure she doesn't dawdle, will you?"

Joanna nodded and thumped her way down the worn stairs and out into the yard again. She twirled on her heel, lost, but there was the barn, off to the left and tucked behind the house. Kicking at a clump of dry grass, she set off.

The barn was dark but hot when she slipped through the open door, and a horse snorted at her while she blinked, waiting for her eyes to adjust. It didn't sound like there was anyone but animals inside, and she was about to leave again when a voice came from above.

"Who's there?"

Casey came clambering down a ladder from the hayloft, thumping to the ground in dirty runners, cutoff shorts with strings hanging past her knees, and a grubby t-shirt.

"Oh," she said, when she saw Joanna. "Hey."

Casey was two years younger and a pain in Joanna's butt, most of the time. She was also a tomboy and tended to do really stupid things for fun; she'd broken her arm twice and her leg once, and one time nearly fractured her collarbone falling off a horse she'd been trying to ride bareback. Joanna heard these stories secondhand from her dad, or from Casey the few times their dads had been planetside and gotten them together for playdates or whatever (excuses for them to sit and drink beer).

"It's hot as fuck in here," said Casey, who had the most eloquently foul mouth of any ten-year-old in history. "Let's go outside and find some shade."

Joanna followed her out of the barn and they went to sit on the grass under a huge poplar tree. The remains of a tire swing (just the rope) disappeared into the leaves overhead. Casey leaned back against the trunk and picked a piece of grass to chew the root off of. Joanna leaned her head against the bumpy bark and started shredding fallen leaves with her nails.

"So you're living here, huh? How long?"

"Don't know. Till my dad gets back to Earth, I guess."

"Grandma said they were out near Capella, and it'll be a month at least," said Casey with a knowledgeable air. They were silent awhile before Casey spoke again, playing with a messy pigtail as she did. "What do you do when he does get back? He's not gonna stay on Earth."

That was probably true. Joanna closed her eyes, enjoying a tickle of breeze on her face. "I guess maybe I'll go into space with him."

"Cool," Casey breathed. She was always begging her dad to take her into space but so far he hadn't allowed more than a tour of the ship in spacedock, which Joanna had heard all about for the entirety of their next visit. Then she gave Joanna's clothes a once-over (pink capri pants and a light blue shirt). "Do you have any jeans?" she asked.

Joanna frowned; she recognized the look in Casey's eyes and the line of questioning, and she wasn't a fan of dirt. "Couple pairs," she said slowly.

Casey stretched out, crossing her suntanned legs in front of her. "That'll have to do for now, I guess. We'll work on it."

Joanna cast around for a distraction. "Dinner's in an hour," she said finally.

***

It was five weeks before Joanna's dad and Uncle Jim arrived at the farm, scooping up the girls for bone-crushing hugs; Uncle Jim did the same for Winona, who laughed and smacked at his shoulders. Joanna had gotten a suntan and three more pairs of jeans (grubby and secondhand and good for all the chores), and was starting to get anxious about school in the fall. She waited desperately for her dad to tell her they were leaving.

Instead, he talked to Winona and she stayed at the farm for two years, taking the bus to school with Casey every morning and twice actually managing to keep her from killing herself in stupid ways. Joanna hated her dad for a solid six months, but then she met a boy and decided things weren't so bad.

When her dad called her on her fourteenth birthday, from the spacebase at Alpha Centauri, he told her he'd gotten approval to bring her aboard the _Enterprise_. She blinked at the screen for a second, speechless, and the first thought that entered her mind was that she probably wouldn't be marrying Sean Smith after all, then.

"Something wrong, Jo?" he asked.

She brought her brain back to the conversation. "No, Daddy." She smiled. "That's cool. I'd like to see space."

"Well, you'll see plenty of it. Anyway, sugar, I've got to go now. Happy birthday."

"Thanks, Daddy. I love you," she said automatically, and let out a deep sigh when the call ended.

After supper and cake, Joanna and Casey went out to the tree behind the barn to sit a while up in the branches, because the house was still hot from the day. Casey poked at things with a stick for a while and Joanna picked thoughtfully at the sole of her shoe, but then she couldn't take the silence anymore and blurted it out.

"My dad's taking me into space," she said in a rush.

Casey screamed and nearly fell out of the tree, leaving Joanna to lunge for a handful of her shirt. "Get the fuck out of here!" she said when she was secure on the branch again, kicking her gangly legs back and forth in excitement. "When?"

"Soon, I guess. They're at Alpha Centauri right now and Daddy said they were gonna come visit."

"I hate you," Casey grinned, and then she neatly swung around to drop out of the tree, rolling when she hit the ground ten feet below.

Joanna shook her head and made for the trunk to climb down like a sane person. Casey was bouncing around by the time she touched the ground again.

"You should be more excited, Jo," she said. "Space! The final frontier!" She waved her arms around for emphasis, nearly tripping over a rock as she walked backwards to the house.

Joanna shrugged. "I'm kind of excited, I guess. It's just... it's all grownups on the ship. Even Lt. Chekov is like 25." She wrinkled her nose; that was old. Also, Lt. Chekov was insane, from what she could see.

"But you get to see your dad! And my dad! And Scotty and Spock! I love them!"

"How can you like _Spock_?"

Casey shrugged. "He's cool, once you get to know him. And his ears are awesome. I wish I had Vulcan ears. And he and Scotty let me poke at computer bits."

For someone who played every sport known to mankind and could care less about school, Casey was a super nerd in disguise, Joanna had noticed.

"Still seems like it might be lonely," she countered, feeling unsure. "And I guess I'd have to do home-school or something."

Casey got that grin that always made the hair on Joanna's arms prickle. "We'll see what we can do about that."

What Casey did about that, Joanna found out, was to mostly disappear into her room for the next week, working on something mysterious and probably suspicious. All became clear on the day their dads showed up (bringing along the dreaded Spock, who always nodded stiffly at her and called her 'Miss McCoy'). Within an hour of the three men settling in the kitchen, Casey had appeared from nowhere, seized Joanna's arm, and dragged her into the room to witness as she presented a five-page, numbered list of arguments in support of her being allowed to go into space, too.

Joanna's dad laughed out loud over his coffee cup and Uncle Jim alternated between looking amused and glaring at him. Spock sat in silence for a moment as the laughter died down, before raising an eyebrow and declaring that first of all, her arguments were 'eminently logical', and secondly that there was no question of Casey being Uncle Jim's daughter. Joanna's dad started laughing all over again and Uncle Jim switched to glaring at Spock instead.

That was only the beginning of a week-long siege, pitting Uncle Jim's patience against Casey's stubbornness. Naturally, Casey won, leaving Uncle Jim to throw his hands in the air and Winona to make comments about apples and trees which he ignored.

And that was how, two weeks later, Joanna found herself packing up her life again (much less of it this time; there were size and weight limits to worry about) and going to Cedar Rapids to take a shuttle to San Francisco, to be transported up to the USS _Enterprise_. But Casey was with her, talking nonstop in her ear the whole way to the coast, and when they stood in line with their bags, between the solid presence of their dads, to board the shuttle that would take them up to the orbiting starship, Casey leaned over and bumped their shoulders together with a huge grin.

Joanna couldn't help grinning back.

THE END


End file.
